Book Review: Over Sea, Under Stone

[osprey_archer]

The young reader works in mysterious ways. Even though I loved Susan Cooper’s The Boggart and King of Shadows, and even though we had a box set of The Dark Is Rising for my entire childhood—and even though I first started my Newbery project when I was eleven, and the fourth book won a Newbery Award!—I didn’t read The Dark Is Rising quintet until after college.

Now littlerhymes and I are rereading it together, starting of course with Over Sea, Under Stone. My recollection is that this book has a very different feel from the rest of the series—not that the rest of the series is all of a piece, either; I’ve always found that interesting about it, that the books should feel so different from each other, it really feels like it just grew.

This one has that very distinctive mid-twentieth century British children’s adventure story feel, like Arthur Ransome, only with some magic coming at the end. Simon, Jane, and Barney are on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a big old house that their parents have rented. They decide to play explorers, and in the process of exploring they stumble upon a strange old map, covered with writing in a language they don’t recognize…

Fortunately their Great Uncle Merry is an Indiana Jones type, a professor who is always dashing about the globe finding treasure, and translating the strange script on the map is a mere bagatelle for him. And it turns out that the map leads to the Holy Grail, which Great Uncle Merry has been looking for himself. But so have his enemies (enemies of the Grail itself), who have been following Great Uncle Merry in hopes that he’ll lead them to it, and now that the children have found the map, Great Uncle Merry takes it upon himself to try to lead these enemies astray so the children will have a free hand to search…

It’s often a difficulty in children’s adventure stories to get the adults out of the way so the children can take a central part in the action, and this particular excuse in Over Sea, Under Stone has always seemed a bit thin to me. Of course it ends up with the children in great danger.

In general I feel this book, indeed the whole series, is best read not for the plot (which often doesn’t make a lot of sense) but for the atmosphere: the fascinating old house with its nautical theme, the Cornish coast in the moonlight, the children clambering around the headland on the seaweed-clogged rocks at the lowest tide of the year; the search through the cave for the Grail, with only a box of damp matches and a soggy candle to light the way.

Comments

[sholio]

I mentioned this when I did my write-ups for these books, but I legit had NO idea this was the first one in the series because it wasn't in my '80s version boxed set, which starts with Dark Is Rising! It was really interesting to read it as an adult. I did enjoy it even coming to it for the first time, but I very much could tell that I would've been ALLLLL over the treasure map/searching element (even more than I am now) if I'd encountered this book at exactly the right age.

I think this is the only book in the series, too, that explicitly spells out Merry = Merlin. As an adult I am pretty sure I would've picked up on it by the end of the series through contextual clues, but as a kid reading it without much knowledge of the Arthur mythos, I very much did not.

[osprey_archer]

I remain fascinated by the box set that simply left out Over Sea, Under Stone. It sort of makes sense, because the other books are more like The Dark Is Rising than Over Sea, Under Stone, so it sort of gives you a better idea what you're getting into... but also it must be very strange when Simon and Jane and Barney pop up in Greenwitch, and it seems clear that you're supposed to remember them from somewhere, except that book wasn't in the set so you don't.